Zeke Hoskin's Blog

Three Young Women With Axes

zeke4blog — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:27:48 +0000

This is not a dirty-old-man reverie. It’s just that the forces of coincidence drug Susan Weiner, Amiee Ringle, and Selina Doran into the house at about the same time. Susan is Rob & Terri’s daughter, home from grad school for a week and over here to play some of her fiddle tunes with us and expose a couple of songs at songwriters circle. Aimee is over from Port Townsend to discuss woods for her upcoming George Thomas guitar, and she let me participate in bringing her old student clarinet out of hibernation. And Selina is coming all the way across the street for what will be among the last of a long series of guitar lessons with Flip as she prepares to head out of town for college. Hearing them two at a time is inspiring. The future is in good hands, folks.

Rob and I premiered The Eagle Sails Today at songwriters’ circle and got lots of useful suggestions. Who’d have thought the word “sloop” would confuse anybody? We’ll have to schlep the sloop into the slop and slip in a ship that won’t slap anybody’s schplensibilities. And clarify the part of the plot where the guy who knows how to sail gets picked up and the guy who doesn’t know how to sail gets dropped off into the Eagle but nobody tells the captain.

Also I got to expose my assigned song, Good Old-Fashioned Phone Book. Considering that it was a silly subject to write anything important about, it went over fine. I have to add something about how useful a good thick phone book was as a booster seat for persons who sat a little shorter because they had, and have, so much more life ahead – those same persons who pointed out that their cell phones remembered numbers so who needs a phone book anymore anyway.

It was a really good circle, with eight people presenting eleven songs. We don’t really have a tradition of how much we expose the process to the world outside — one of the points of this kind of thing is that you get to try out things that may not work. For me, one of the highlights was Susan’s co-written song Happily Ever After, looking at a real relationship using fairy-tale paradigms. Every beauty must have her beast . . .

I’m not best pleased with ScribeFire. After I previewed this post, I couldn’t find the handle to edit it, so I published as is. That brought back the edit page, but after I had edited it wouldn’t let me publish it as an edit, only as a new post. Undoubtedly I can figure out what I did wrong, but to my grumpy mind the purpose of a program isn’t to punish wrongdoing, it’s to facilitate some task besides learning how to deal with software intolerance. But what do I know – I haven’t programmed professionally for three years now//Zeke

Stupid Web Pages with No Feedback. Oh, and sharing Google Documents

zeke4blog — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:22:21 +0000

You have eight brown gloves and six black gloves in a drawer. Reaching in blindly, how many gloves do you have to take out to be sure of having a matching pair? Answer: Three. If the first two don’t match, the third is bound to match one or the other.
Huh?
Thats what came up when I did a random dip into “math puzzles”. And there was no way to get at the author, short of hacking. Why in the name of all that is holy, and I am a correctness-worshipper, would anybody publish egregiously stupid stuff and not provide a way to correct it? Is it part of a plot to dumb down our youth?
Actually, I can’t see that there is any one right answer, though that one is certainly wrong. My first thought was eight gloves. Assuming that the gloves are actually pairs, then you might pick seven left gloves in a row, but then the eighth is bound to be a right. Or, if you can distinguish left from right by touch, pick five lefts and a right. The lefts can’t all be the wrong color. It’s a good question, really, but blandly providing one wrong answer is infuriating.

Ah, but this is a songwriting blog. And on Thursday evening I got to co-write with Rob Lopresti. He had a topic ready, a local sailing story from 1875, and it felt to me as if he had most of the song done but inaccessible somewhere in his head, because he came up with words, lines, and verses a lot quicker than I did. Still, it was fun, and I got to do my share of the melody. Then he put it up on Google Documents and shared it with me. Now that’s a great tool. Google claims we’re up to the eightieth revision at this point, but it seems to save a version every time somebody finishes a line. Probably the realistic figure would be about three revisions each. This is actually fun.

Fixing Assorted Rowing Machinery

zeke4blog — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:35:06 +0000

We just got permission to try to sell the RowMobile at the adaptive cycling show tomorrow. I spent a chunk of AM getting preliminary pages for yesterday’s requests up on the computer, then took the silly thing for a spin. It’s still really awkward, but now the right chain goes slack so the beginning of the stroke is just waving the handle to no useful effect, and also it won’t turn right very well. so I washed it anyway and tightened the steering wire and, at Fl!p’s suggestion, pulled the end hooks off the elastics that tighten the chains and cut 2 in off the left one and 6 in off the right one and torched the cut ends with a cigarette lighter and put it all back together and it was way better. I put in maybe half a mile around the neighborhood to test it out and then finished washing the bottom of it. So far, so good.

I’ve been trying to get back into rowing shape on the Concept II that Fl!p bought me in the garage, but yesterday the garage was so dusty from cleaning that I got a scratchy throat after 2500 meters (in 12:22, so the farthest that I’ve gone at 200 m/min). Today I swept the kitchen and the garage and much of the patio until my forearm started giving warning signs, so that little row on the roads will be it. Meanwhile, I did finally call Sterling Donalson about getting the crack in the Maas 24 fixed, and arranged to bring it in early Monday. Whether it will be ready to row on Wednesday morning with Lesley Rigg is a whole different question, but there’s always the Trimline.

This evening will be dinner with Rob Lopresti while Terri is over here for Fl!p’s women’s (god, the spell checker doesn’t like women’s) evening. Maybe we can co-write a song. I’ve cerainly written diddly today, though all the arranging of requests, esp somebody Stole, has to count for something, and today was the day I actually went and started this blog. and that was the usual mess of which software does what – after I jumped through the hoops incident on installing Scribefire, it turns out that it won’t actually create a blog, so I had to start one on WordPress after all, instead of hosting it with everything else on my own web site. what the hell, it’s not as if anything worth reading is likely to get onto it . . .

A Whole Bunch of Requests

zeke4blog — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:21:52 +0000

Thursday, May 13, 2010. As usual I managed to waste much of the day, possibly abetted by driving Fl!p to and from an ophthamologist appointment. We had a pair of gigs, the first being the monthly concert/singalong at the Willows. I sang two of my songs, because Fl!p was saving her voice. Suddenly we were singing Somebody Stole My Gal, which I had never sung. Then we got requests for Three O’Clock In The Morning and Beyond The Sea. And when we sang Home On The Range, it was brought to my attention that I still don’t know the third verse – air is so pure, zephyrs so free, breezes so balmy and light (bear in mind this is about Kansas, dry land’s answer to storms at sea). So now I do.

Then on to the Housing Co-Op, where Fl!p was calling playparties. They were running way behind, and people were milling about smiling at each other and being cooperative. Coming from a dour culture, I get all distrustful when people smile for no reason. Eventually they finished burning their bad feelings in the bonfire and Fl!p called about six playparties and split. That’s less calling time than they paid for, but an hour of hanging around being invited to eat desserts that she can’t has to count for something.

Let ‘em Drown!

zeke4blog — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:25:08 +0000

Post for Wednesday, May 12, 2010. Some years ago I read a snippet about Captain Pamphlet bringing his rumrunning ship into US waters to rescue a shipwrecked crew and getting busted. I wrote part of a song, mostly a chorus that began “Let ‘em drown, let the Yankees drown, let ‘em feed the fish, let ‘em pass a law that men can breathe salt water if they wish . . . I could never find out any more about it and I let the song wither. Finally, one of my sporadic checks found that newspaper images had ben OCR’d enough for a web search to find them, and I got three articles. So now I get back to work on the song.